Particle-in-Cell simulation of radio-frequency ion thruster RIT-2.5 using 2.xD approach in cylindrical coordinate system

A kinetic simulation of radio-frequency plasma is a highly sought-after tool for ion thrusters. A Particle-in-Cell code, named PlasmaPIC, has been developed to simulate plasma inside small-sized thrusters using massive parallelization running on a High-Performance Computing Cluster. For particle-based simulation of the plasma in larger structures, the computational power increases rapidly. To overcome this limitation the variant named PlasmaPIC-Cyl is developed using polar coordinates that use either axisymmetry conditions or a partial 3D approach. In this paper, the 2.xD - approach which denotes the partial 3D domain, is described for the simulation of radio-frequency ion thrusters. It has been used for the simulation of plasma properties like density, the temperature inside the plasma chamber and the extraction of the ion beam. The code is employed for the characterization of a radio frequency ion thruster, RIT-2.5, a thruster with a diameter of 2.5 cm. In this paper, the simulations are compared with the measurements to some extent to validate the numerical model. We further show its applicability in grid erosion calculations which can be used for the lifetime prediction of the gridded thrusters.